Friday, December 02, 2011

The Laptop With The Mostest

We bought a new laptop. It came bundled with a lot of bloatware. These two bits of free software were enormously helpful:

PC Decrapifier, which helped me to remove a lot of pre-loaded and unwanted programs that were souring my fresh-out-the-box new-computer experience.

Malwarebytes, which found a trojan on a new computer I hadn't even used yet. In the blink of an eye it was gone.

Both programs are free for the basic version, easy to install, and don't, that I know, deposit any dregs on your hard drive. I've used Malwarebytes in addition to McAfee Antivirus and Webroot's Spy Sweeper for about 5 years and it always finds things these two don't.

6 comments:

Gary's heard of both these programs. A trojan in an UNUSED, new computer?--YIKES! That's kind of scary--makes you wonder if it were really new.... or if possibly it were manufactured in one of our "axis of evil" countries?

Yikes is right. It was called a TrojanDropper. What are you going to do. Just about any online activity opens you up to these things anymore. I remember back in 1992, when the World Wide Web was coming into existence, after the internet, and people were beginning to use web browsers, like Netscape, nobody had any anti-virus software. I mean, it was the wild west of the web back then.

You should try Ubuntu (or one the several other user friendly versions of Linux) at some point. You can install it side by side (dual boot) with Windows. Also, you can boot and run it straight from a thumb drive without having to load it on your computer if you just wanted to try it out.

I run Ubuntu on one of my work machines. I occasionally have to use a "virtual windows machine" on it to run some things, but 98% of the time it does everything I need.There are a whole lot fewer security issues with Linux machines.

My husband has Ubuntu on an old computer. He likes it, says the same as you, that it's less vulnerable. One thing I liked ... we have an old scanner that Ubuntu ran right-away with some basic generic scanning software, Windows 7 didn't.

Come to think of it, the recovery DVDs I made probably have that trojan embedded in them! And you have to make them and you have to use them because these computers don't come with back-up OS CDs anymore. For crying out loud... See, this is where Ubuntu starts to look attractive.